Block #1: 7th Avenue between 36th & 37th Streets — Midtown Manhattan
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Humans of New York is a project that started out of a truthful observation: most New Yorkers don’t ever get to know the people they cross paths with every day. We realized it was the same for the neighborhoods and places New Yorkers frequent in the city on a daily basis. We want to know more about the street blocks we’ve been crossing everyday for ten years without giving a second thought to it. We want to know how many people pass on a sidewalk everyday and what pattern they follow.
Overall, we want to know more about our city and how people move about it — and we’re going to do this block by block, using data from Placemeter, which measures physical movements throughout the city.
Welcome to Blocks of New York!
Update [2/11/15]: After a thorough investigation, it seems that the unexplained 1PM drop in pedestrian counts was caused by specific weather conditions at the studied location that caused an unusual effect from Placemeter sensors, and they’re working on a fix. As we suspected, people in this busy area are not actually running for cover at precisely 1PM every day!
For our first block, let’s head to Midtown, Manhattan, in the Garment District on 7th Avenue between 36th and 37th Streets, one of the busiest neighborhoods in New York, right in the middle of Penn Station and Times Square:
A lot of people work here: there are almost only office buildings, some restaurants, and a few shops. This block is zoned as part of a Mixed Manufacturing & Residential District, like most of the Garment District. The breakdown of square footage on this block is 38% office, 21% residential, 16% retail, 1% garage, the remaining 24% probably being manufacturing which is very specific to this district. Compare that to a typical block in an area like the Upper West Side, where residential square footage represents 65% or more on average. It’s also a very touristy area since it’s close to Times Square, with the hordes of souvenir and electronics shops typical of this neighborhood. Take a look at the foot traffic data between Tuesday, January 20th and Tuesday, January 27th:
The green line represents people going North toward Times Square, the grey line represents people going South toward Penn Station.
First of all we can clearly see the morning commute during weekdays with a steady peak at 8:00 AM coming from Penn Station toward Times Square, between 1,400 and 1,600 people per hour. In the evening it’s equally crystal clear: we see the opposite flow with people heading back toward Penn Station to catch their train home with peaks around 6:00 PM and an average of 2,400 people per hour (sum of both directions).
Things get interesting toward Thursday and Friday, where we begin to see earlier evening peaks at 4:00 PM and 3:00 PM, respectively, probably related to workers heading home — or elsewhere — earlier than usual, and the emergence of late night peaks around 10:00 PM, when we’re guessing some folks have itchy feet and want to continue the party toward Times Square. There is probably a significant number of tourists in that batch too.
The weekend is way quieter in numbers, probably explained by the snowy weather last Friday night and Saturday. While there is no obvious morning and evening rush hour, there are still a lot of people there with a peak of 1,137 people at 4:00 PM. If you’ve ever stood on 7th Avenue during the weekend, wondering whether you read your calendar wrong, here’s solid proof that you’re not crazy, and most of the day is just as active on weekends as on weekdays.
Note the orange circles that correspond to a significant drop every day at the same hour, around 1:00 PM, including a huge one on Sunday. While the lunch break peak at noon is very obvious on weekdays, this is interesting behavior that is unattributable to anything we would expect. One of the most interesting things about working with sensor data is testing it against hypotheses and trying to figure out explanations and theories about the causes of certain artifacts, whether they really occurred or represent technical glitches. This one’s persistence makes it worth looking into, so we’re going to investigate and will keep you posted on our findings. Feel free to chime in if there’s something about this block we don’t know!
And then comes this past Monday, the 26th, with a huge peak at 8:00 AM like on previous weekdays, coming from Penn Station toward Times Square. Then we can clearly see that people left work way earlier than usual since there’s no serious evening peak: Snowmaggedon is coming! Compared to a regular weekday, the difference is very striking. Now here is the post-so-called-Snowmaggedon-Tuesday:
The analysis is obvious: people mostly stayed home on that day.
While on the previous Tuesday we had an evening peak at 2,691 people at 6:00 PM, the post-Snowmaggedon evening peak is barely at 440 people at 6:00, a drop of 83.7%. The total count for these two consecutive Tuesdays is 25,464 versus 5,368 people, a decrease of 78.9%!
Overall, notwithstanding the bad weather, this data clearly reflects an archetypical business neighborhood. Tons of people commute to it in the morning, work in the city, and then leave from the neighborhood in the evening — each day a little earlier toward the weekend. It also demonstrates how touristy this area is, with visitors wanting to grasp an authentic New York experience in Times Square, sometimes by night during the week, and throughout the day in the weekend.
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The BONY Team
Dataset (CSV)
Sources: Placemeter Data, Google Maps, PLUTO data.
